Super short original tales to snack on
by Rebekah Postupak
The Door
by Rebekah Postupak
for the Trifecta writing challenge
(333 words exactly)
In her parents’ will was a car door. Like it wasn’t already inconsiderate enough of her parents to up and die shortly after Sasha’s twentieth birthday—but they left her a door, and that’s it? It wasn’t even a pretty door, just a 1970s green one with the kind of window you have to crank up and down like a ten-pound free weight.
Sasha grumbled about it to her friends (or, more accurately, to the one friend who still listened long after everyone else’s eyes had rolled back into their heads). Truthfully, she complained to anyone with ears.
“I was counting on that money for college!” she said. She dabbed at her eyes before adding hastily, on seeing her therapist’s raised brow, “I mean, after I tragically found out about their deaths and heroically decided I should go.”
“Maybe the door is meant symbolically,” said Sam the Mailman, handing her a bill from Macy’s.
“It’s the door to a new you!” her personal trainer said. “The door of possibility.”
Sasha sniffed. “More like the door of inconvenience.”
“Why are you hanging on to the door, then?” asked her therapist some months later. “Let’s talk about that for a minute.”
“Shouldn’t we talk some more about how my parents stiffed me?” said Sasha, sending Dark Thoughts toward the door, which was now leaning quite comfortably against the wall.
“Your dime,” said the therapist, equally comfortably.
As soon as the session ended, Sasha sold the door, calculating that the $100 would cover three mani/pedis, which was a much better legacy and would help her think more favorably of her deceased parents.
Not being the reading sort, she missed the next day’s report on how a local junk dealer found a bag of diamonds stashed in a car door and closed his business so he could take his family to their new home in Tahiti for the winter.
“It was the door of healing,” Sasha said proudly to her friend Rick, just before he dozed off.